In the wake of the financial crisis, “Sesame Street” is teaching children financial literacy. Ron Lieber talks to Elmo about saving and sharing.
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posted in Financial Literacy, kid | 0 Comments
Renting a home is cheaper than buying in just three of Britain’s 50 biggest towns and cities, according to a new study.
The findings highlight the stark injustice and worsening situation for millions of people priced out of the property market.
A year ago, it was only cheaper to buy in 40 out of 50 towns.
As the banking industry, rocked by the financial crisis, has tightened lending criteria on mortgages and demanded bigger deposits, it has left many more would-be first-time buyers stuck on the sidelines.
This has forced many more people to rent rather than buy, and spurred landlords to cash in on the rising demand and charge tenants more.
Average rents have been on the rise for most of 2010 and 2011.
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posted in Mortgage, Real Estate | 0 Comments
In his prime, Johnny Unitas was the guy you wanted quarterbacking a football team. The Hall of Famer set seven lifetime NFL passing records during his storied career. But he might not be your pick to run a circuit-board maker.
In 1984, Unitas and partners bought National Circuits for $3.5 million. The company foundered, and six years later they could only sell it for $1 million. Unitas declared bankruptcy in 1991 after he couldn’t pay back loans he took to purchase National.
“The No. 1 reason athletes lose money is they invest in areas they don’t really understand and not related to their expertise,” says Alan Lancz, a wealth manager who works with a number of professional athletes.
Björn Borg’s another good example. When he retired from tennis at the age of 27 in 1983, the Swede had won 11 Grand Slam championships. He tried to replicate his on-court success in the world of fashion with the Björn Borg Design Group; it didn’t work.
The company quickly ran into liquidity problems and shut down in 1989. Borg refused to take outside financing for fear of losing control of the company. Creditors later sued Borg, but he claimed he couldn’t pay because he was “more or less bankrupt.”
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posted in Financial Literacy | 0 Comments
Already, smartphones can pay for Big Macs, Girl Scout cookies, and taxi rides. With the much-anticipated rollout of Google Wallet underway, some models will also be able to spend gift cards and pay at many more locations.
Google Wallet and MasterCard PayPass, two examples of mobile money, work by storing your card data (from credit cards, prepaid cash cards, and loyalty cards) on your phone, then transmitting the info to the checkout stand when you wave or tap your device.
With new applications and improved phones making mobile money more common, this is a good time to master the basics:
Tap-and-pay systems. Google Wallet and MasterCard PayPass transmit your encrypted payment information wirelessly from your phone or a keychain gizmo to a special reader. Some systems require physical contact between your phone and the reader, but a new generation of phones hitting the market in 2012 will turn the tap to a wave.
While this may not sound like a big improvement over swiping a credit card, it might save you time and money as daily deals, coupons, gift cards, and loyalty rewards programs are integrated. Meanwhile, transit systems in London, New York, and Singapore are all evaluating PayPass as a replacement for metrocards.
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posted in General Finance, software | 0 Comments
The eagerness to join the queue to buy Northern Rock never came close to matching the rush to line up outside its branches to pull savings out.
But at least the sale means that the beginning of the end of a disappointing British banking saga has arrived.
Northern Rock stood for all that went bad in the UK’s banking system, as those who should have known better bundled recklessly into a headlong rush to throw money at borrowers, believing that the days of easy credit could never end and house prices could never fall.
The Rock dispensed with the idea of backing mortgages with savers’ deposits and instead borrowed huge amounts on the wholesale money markets to fund rapidly expanding mortgage lending – money was cheap, house prices were going up, you couldn’t lose.
It was different this time.
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Soaring unemployment is forcing many workers who lose their job to become self-employed.
The number of self-employed people has jumped to its highest level since records began nearly 20 years ago, official figures revealed yesterday.
Between August and October, 166,000 more people became self-employed, raising the total to 4.1million, the Office for National Statistics said.
Experts raised doubts over whether all of these were happy about the decision, or simply had no other option.
Michael Saunders, of investment bank Citigroup, said: ‘It may well be some, having lost their jobs, categorise themselves as self-employed but really are unemployed or at least under-employed.’
It comes at a time when there are said to be 461,000 vacancies in the UK.
John Philpott, of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said: ‘I do not think there has been a sudden surge of entrepreneurial zeal. This is people who cannot get a job picking up bits and pieces of work.
‘It is a sign of economic weakness, rather than strength.’
Vicky Redwood, chief UK economist at the consultancy Capital Economics, said the jump is likely to reflect people ‘resorting to working for themselves.
Yesterday the Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, insisted the latest figures show ‘some signs that the labour market is stabilising’ but said the increase in unemployment was ‘unwelcome.’
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